Let's Pick Another Metaphor, Shall We?

On Thursday Dwight Garner favorably reviewed a new book of revisionist history, "The Korean War" by left-wing University of Chicago history professor Bruce Cumings, which "puts the reflexive anti-Americanism of North Korea's leaders into sympathetic historical context." Garner is a reliable fan of books from controversial left-wing historians [1].

The headline isn't a masterpiece of good taste: "Carpet-Bombing Falsehoods About a War That's Little Understood [2]." But there was worse to come.

Besides overpraising the latest work of Cumings, convincingly accused [3] of being an apologist for the ghastly totalitarian regime of North Korea, Garner unloads this wince-inducing metaphor:

Mr. Cumings is chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago and the author of "The Origins of the Korean War," a respected two-volume survey. He mows down a host of myths about the war in his short new book, which is a distillation of his own scholarship and that of many other historians. But he begins by mowing down David Halberstam.

Yikes. Journalist Halberstam was in San Francisco when he died in 2007, perishing from blunt force trauma when the car he was riding in was hit broadside while making a turn.

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